By: Nik Palmieri

Report

Urbanization and urban immigration is increasing rapidly, so much so that the present number of people living in urban centers (3.2 billion) exceeds the total population of the world when JFK was inaugurated.

This rapid urbanization is a result of poor rural families moving into cities hoping for more job opportunities.

The Urban Climatric

This sudden upwelling of rural citizens has not , as they would have hoped, provided more jobs but just increased the prevalence of slums and the number of people living in slums on the outlying borders of major city centers.

This upwelling has occurred partially because the countryside has reached capacity and will actually start shrinking in population by 2020.

As a result, virtually all population growth of the future will occur in urban centers.

The UN-HABITAT program gathers information on slums and their populations.

A slum is technically considered an “impoverished district” but are more like shanty towns that are not really integrated into a city but are rather haphazardly constructed outside a city with whatever materials can be scavenged by the impoverished people living in them.

Almost always unhealthy and unsafe and are major centers for crime, violence, and disease.

The Prevalence of Slums

According to UN-HABITAT reports:

The highest percentages of people living in slums are Ethiopia at the top (99.4% of the population) With Chad, Afghanistan, and Nepal following closely.

Many of these places are war-torn areas so that obviously factors in.

Bombay is the global center of slums with around 12 million people living in the slums around the city. Mexico City and Dhaka follow closely with around 10 million each.

Lagos, Cairo, Karachi, Sao Paulo, Shanghai and Delhi all have around 8 million living in slums.

Surprisingly, the fastest growing slums are in the Russian Federation and former Soviet republics.

Davis, Mike. Planet of Slums. London: Verso2007. Print.

Work Cited